Free Return to Honor by Doug Beason Page A

memo for flowers to be sent, and looked up on the roster who the backups were for the sortie, all within a minute of the call.
    Major Gutiérrez made the call to Petty Officer Yoli Aquinaldo himself. Since he had placed the two on standby, he wasn’t surprised in the least when the phone was answered on the first ring. He informed Aquinaldo to report, with a haircut and a week’s change of clothes, to the AMC terminal in the morning for the flight with Air Force One.
    The only thing that disturbed him was that Aquinaldo sounded as if he had a slight cold … and if he had a cold, then why was there giggling in the background?
    But the one thing Major Gutiérrez had learned as an enlisted man, and what had made him so successful in getting the job done as an officer, was that if he treated his people as mature individuals, they’d come through for him.
    So he forgot the entire matter, but still made a note for his secretary to call the two in the morning, three hours before show time, to make sure they made it on time.
    U.S.S.S. Bifrost
    Lieutenant Colonel George Frier pushed through the tunnel connecting the living quarters and the operations center. He floated through the middle of the complex, stopping only when he grabbed a handhold. His feet spun forward when he stopped, so he applied a little more torque with his hands to keep himself still. Below him floated southern India. The view rapidly changed to the soft blue stretches of ocean as BIGEYE sped toward Antarctica.
    The view from BIGEYE’s main portal never stopped astounding Frier. Even after the year and a half of being BIGEYE’s commander, any view from the portal three hundred miles above the Earth’s surface still took his breath away. He loved it up there. His rotund features, remnants of the hard and athletic body he had years before coming to BIGEYE, were dangerously flabby from the extended period in zero-g. His heart was pumping much too hard, and calcification had started melding his joints, but it was all worth it to him. Especially because, for the first time since the crash, he was useful again.
    The disintegration of his body was nothing compared to the satisfaction he felt working as commanding officer in the United States’ Space-Based Observation Platform—nicknamed “BIGEYE” by the press, for its primary purpose was spying.
    The cameras and sensors aboard BIGEYE were capable of reading a license plate from three hundred miles up. And if Washington wanted him to collect the data when it was dark on earth, the IR sensors on BIGEYE were almost as good as the visual ones. BIGEYE circled the Earth in a polar orbit, passing over every point on the earth—or at least passing near enough to get information—every twelve hours. It was the United States’ ultimate in verification technology, and Lieutenant Colonel George Frier was the lucky son of a bitch who headed it up.
    So when the buzzer sounded for Frier to check the alignment on the laser relay, he didn’t think anything of it. The message came in code, preceded by a puzzling juxtaposition of three lettered words, all different. Normal procedure was to store the message with the other clandestine codes beamed up by operatives and squirt the entire sequence to NSA headquarters in Maryland. The squirt compressed the messages into the on/off bit patterns recognizable to computers and could be transmitted to the ground in a tenth of a second.
    A laser beam was locked onto the huge dish antennas at NSA. Any attempt at a tap automatically broke the loop and introduced random messages into the stream, confusing the intended interceptor and alerting NSA that the transmission was being tapped.
    The computer screen lit up, acknowledging the message had been successfully sent. Frier hummed to himself and went about his duties, oblivious to the passage of time.
    Andrews Air Force Base, Washington, D.C.
    “How’s the plane?”
    The crew chief spun on his heel and saluted. “Super, Colonel. The